You're Doing It Wrong

Can I whine about my cold for a couple seconds? Remember when this started last week and I said I had a bit of a headache and a scratchy throat? It’s gone downhill since then. Every day I feel a teeny bit worse than the day before. I’m sleeping worse each night. I’m coughing more and my head grows heavier with snot. Is this even allowed? Shouldn’t I be feeling better? Where are the cough drops?

Big River in Orleans
BG sent a picture of the high river so I thought I’d post it here with some comparison photos. You can click on the photos for a larger version.

I took this May 04 from the house looking downriver.

This is from 12.26.05 looking across the river at the house, right before we left after Xmas.

This is the photo that BG sent. You’re looking downriver toward the house. Wild, eh?

email oof
I had this spam filter thing set up and it worked great but at some point in the last couple weeks I had a paranoid moment because I hadn’t gotten any email at all and suspected my filter was haywire. [It made sense at the time.] So I turned it off. Suddenly my spam went up about 1000%. When I went to reset the filter how I used to have it, it was gone [obviously the gaping hole in user’s technical skills]. So I set up this other kind of filter and email went to zero again, including test messages I sent myself (from another account). I’ve gone back and turned this off.

Meanwhile, if you’re still reading and you sent me a message yesterday or the day before, I probably didn’t get it and you probably didn’t get a bounce notice. Could you send it again?

This is a post for all the people who have heard of Orleans but have never been there or wonder what it’s like.

This links to a site with road trips for motorcycles. This link is Highway 96 and surrounding roadways. It has lots of great photos and maps of the area. Enjoy.

I started out looking for links to weather and road conditions because they’re getting a lot of rain down there. I tried to call and got no answer and no machine which means no power. Bummer.

Happy New Year
We watched a fantastic movie last night: Nowhere in Africa. It won the foreign film Oscar in 03 and is a beautiful film. It’s about a Jewish family that moves to Kenya right before WWII. We both loved it.

I used to have this thing that I called nervous stomach. It was from a combination of eating and drinking too much and I would wake up in the middle of the night and feel sick and be unable to sleep. I would sip a little alka seltzer or ginger tea and read or watch TV and after a couple hours I could fall asleep and I’d be fine in the morning. This used to happen a lot but I can’t remember the last time it happened.

Until last night.

And I don’t think I drank or ate too much so I don’t know what the magical formula is but I woke up at about 11:57pm (of course) and my stomach was lurching all over the place. I made some ginger tea and listened to the fire crackers and then read my book for 2 hours before I fell asleep. I have just enough of a cough to wake me up every two hours so when I finally woke up I was a bit bleary eyed and had a slight twinge of a headache. Somehow I couldn’t let the rest of the world go through it without me.

Last Post for 2005
Geez, two steps forward, three steps back. For every item I manage to put away, 3 more come through the door. Not just fun stuff either. I’m not griping about gifts. It’s everything: mail, fresh laundry. I went out to the garage to stash something and noticed there is a mountain of empty boxes. We need to break a few of those down and gift them to Mr. Recycling Man and I’m not clear on this but he’s coming tomorrow? Sunday, Jan 1st instead of Monday the 2nd? Maybe I’m dreaming.

I had a good birthday although it got off to a rugged start. Both Bob and I are fighting colds. I think Bob’s a little worse off than I am although neither or us is in very bad shape. But it’s the thing where you wake up feeling gross and once you’ve moved around, drank some tea and showered, you’re at about 90%.

I knew I wanted to see a movie and I knew where I wanted to go for dinner, Roots which is completely on the far east side of Vancouver, technically Camus. This made the location of the movie matter and somewhat also the timing. Brokeback Mountain wasn’t going to work which left my other choice: King Kong. Did you know that movie is 3 hours long?

That made me cranky (see above about just woke up and cold symptoms). I checked out a few other movies but really the only other thing I might have wanted to see was Chronicles of Narnia, which I’ve already seen once. I whined a bit and Bob asked me what I wanted to do and I said, “I want to see King Kong and I want it to be shorter.”

He indicated that this was 1 birthday wish he could not make come true and after some more consulting of the movie times, we decided to see an early King Kong and then go to dinner.

Other than being too long, King Kong is an excellent and thrilling movie. It took about 10 years off my life. (It also made me cry.) Wild, scary stuff. At one point, during the Skull Island part, there was this endless scene involving huge bugs. I squirmed in my seat for about 5 minutes and then leaned over to Bob and said, “We’re NEVER going there.” And unless they have a hippie jam band festival, I think he agrees.

Dinner was fantastic. We hardly ever splurge on a super deluxe meal and this was worth every penny. We shared a crab and avocado appetizer and a beet salad and our entrees were filet mignon with some sort of bleucheese butter (!) and grilled wild salmon with greens. For dessert we split a Kahlua creme brulee. I must learn how to make this dessert.

Great day. Great year. A couple more days off to clean up and more Photoshop and updating my iPod with new tunes and playlists. I’m also big on cleaning things out at new years. Like the bathroom cupboard. You know you always find about 4 bottles of sunscreen with 1 tiny squish left or some bath gel that you forgot you had. And I’m going to take down the tree and put away the holiday stuff. And I’m going to process Mr. Pumpkin. I will most likely photo-document it for you here so stay tuned.

Happy New Year.

Today’s post is about clothing (bottoms) and high waistbands.

I never had a problem with high waistbands. Not even when the style was to have a waistband that was so low, special extra-short zippers had to be invented and the full-monty down low wax became a common procedure. (In some circles. I haven’t gone for it myself, but if I do, you can be sure I’ll share all the details here.)

Pretty soon even clothes for people like me (meaning old and without style) started to lower the waistband. Not to that scary, omigod how does that even stay up Ana Lucia from Lost low — but below the navel. And once I got used to it, I kinda liked it.

Then I had to buy new underwear because all my underwear came up around my armpits and stuck out over the waistband

But still, the high waist haunts me. All my winter tights come up around my armpits. My silk longjohns: armpits. It’s not a crisis because I’m usually wearing sweaters and shirts that hang over the waistband anyway – but not an overall sexy look to have the waistband of your underclothes hanging out over your waistband.

My Mom got me some really cute new sweats for xmas and I love them and their low waistband. Except now my yoga pants stick out. *sigh*

Die Fat Free Cheese, Die
I accidentally bought Fat Free Feta Cheese.

I tasted a sliver and was like, “Omigod, what is wrong with this cheese? It’s nasty.” Then I saw the package.

uck. Completely inedible.

It should be illegal to make a product that is called both “fat free” and cheese.

50 Book Challenge – I’m a winner
I finished book #50 yesterday. You can see the entire list here.

I’m going to keep a running tally of my books next year, too but I’m not going to aim for 50. I have some other projects I want to put some time into and I don’t want to get sucked into that overachiever thing where I get all panicked if I haven’t finished a book in a couple weeks.